Found in 3 comments on Hacker News
bumbledraven · 2024-01-02 · Original thread
Related:

Hartzler, "A two-and-one-half-place logarithm table", The Mathematics Teacher, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Mar 1960) https://www.jstor.org/stable/27956101

Bayer, "Setting up an approximate antilog table", The Mathematics Teacher, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Mar 1962) https://www.jstor.org/stable/27956560

Doerfler, "Dead Reckoning: Calculating Without Instruments", Taylor Trade Publishing (Sep 1993) https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Reckoning-Calculating-Without-In...

dahart · 2023-12-16 · Original thread
> The slide rules, also known colloquially as “slip sticks”, were the only calculators available before the electronic age, traveled with the Apollo 11 on the Moon and, essentials on board aircraft for the dead reckoning, are still required as a means of emergency.

This sentence is funny for several reasons, not least of which is it comes after a long list of pre-electronics calculators.

The mention of dead reckoning totally reminded me of one of the coolest math books I ever bought, and I think I first heard about it in a comment here on HN. Maybe I can pass this recommend on to someone else who will appreciate it. “Dead Reckoning: Calculating Without Instruments” by Ronald Doerfler https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Reckoning-Calculating-Without-In...

It covers how to do lots of calculations very efficiently mentally or manually on paper, not just arithmetic but roots and powers, logarithms and exponents, and trig functions (sin,cos,tan,asin,acos,atan). Lots of interesting number theory, lots of stuff that’s useful in computer science, and a tour de force of the most important analog calculator this article didn’t cover: the human calculator. ;)

dahart · 2018-03-22 · Original thread
There are lots of ways, depending on what you want to calculate.

Here's a fantastic book on the subject:

https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Reckoning-Calculating-Without-In...

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